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Archive for May 17th, 2007

Ubuntu 7.04

Today I upgraded my Ubuntu pc (which I use daily) from 6.06 to 6.10 and then from 6.10 to 7.04. It took forever, but was incredibly easy and so far has gone very smoothly. It was as simple as installing a Windows service pack. I'm very impressed.

Meanwhile, in Vista land… snicker… I've had two crashes/bugs this week which caused me to reboot. One totally froze everything except Windows Media Player. The other wasn't a crash per se, but the Start menu stopped responding to mouse clicks; this is the second or third time that has happened and the only solution I've found is to reboot. The "funny" (ha ha) thing is that the reliability monitor doesn't show anything bad happening at these times. What's the point of having a reliability monitor which doesn't detect fatal errors? It's like having a blind traffic cop. [no offense to all the blind traffic cops out there…]

I am not at all impressed with Vista. I've been using it every day for the past month and a half and still regard it as just a "dumb blonde" version of XP. The security system is annoying. The sluggishness (which makes my brand new pc effectively slower than my 5-year-old XP box) is annoying. The crashes are annoying. Vista is annoying.

Ubuntu, meanwhile, is great. I'm running it on a very old pc, and sure, it's a little slow, but it's reliable. That's what I want in a computer. Reliability. Up time.

Not speed. Not fancy schmancy translucent interface thingamajigs. Not "are you sure? are you sure? are you sure?" whenever I'm trying to keep my apps up to date.

Ubuntu: thumbs up

Vista: thumbs down